The Lord Knows Those Who Are His

It was at the end, when everybody else had gone to the cars.

The son stayed. Mid forties, good coat, had held it together all morning, and he waited until there was nobody within thirty feet and then asked it straight out, in the flat voice people use when they have been carrying a question for a week and have decided to just say it.

Is he with God.

Not a rhetorical question. Not a request for a comforting noise. The man looked at him and waited for an answer, and the wind was going through the hedge, and the minister stood there for what he estimates was three seconds and which he thinks about at odd hours.

What he said was: I do not know, and God does, and God is good.

He has run that sentence over about two hundred times since. He believes every part of it. He also knows exactly what it sounded like at a graveside on a Tuesday, and he knows the son heard it as an evasion, because he watched the man's face do the small thing that a face does when it has been given nothing.

He is fifty one and he has been doing this for twenty two years and he is not going to start lying at fifty one. But he came home and sat in the car on the drive and thought: there has to be more than that. I cannot possibly have nothing to give a man in that position.

Sit down here. There is more than that, and it is not a softer version of a lie.

The verse that puts the knowing where it belongs

Here is the sentence that was wanted on Tuesday and would not come under pressure. The Spirit put it in the book for exactly that kind of three seconds.

But God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: The Lord knows those who are his.2 Timothy 2:19

Look at what it does with the question. It does not answer it about any particular person, and it does not leave a vacuum either. It moves the knowing to God and then calls that a foundation and a seal, which is the language of something settled and secure rather than something unresolved.

That is the crucial difference between what you said and what that verse says. Yours sounded like an absence of information. This is a positive statement: the knowing exists, it is complete, and it is held by Somebody.

So it is not a shrug. You are standing on a foundation rather than in a gap, and 2 Timothy 2:19 says the Lord knows those who are His, and the Spirit had that written as a seal on a foundation for people in exactly your three seconds.

Notice as well where it sits. Paul is writing in a passage about people in the church who have gone wrong and about arguments over who is genuine, and this is his settling line. The context is exactly the anxiety about who is in, and the answer given is not a method for telling. It is a Person who already knows.

That is worth carrying into every one of these conversations for the rest of your ministry. The anxiety about who is genuinely in is not a modern problem and it is not a failure of nerve; it was live enough in the first century that a letter had to address it. And the answer given there is not a sharper test. It is a seal, on a foundation, with a name on it.

What the son was actually asking

Now the man in the good coat, because the answer has been assessed for a week and the question has not.

He almost certainly was not asking for information. Men in that position rarely are. What he was asking, underneath, is something like: is my father in trouble, and is God the sort of God who would be careful with him.

You answered the first half, honestly, and had nothing left for the second half, and that is what his face was doing.

The second half is the one you can answer, at length, without inventing anything. God's character is not classified information. What is written about His mercy, His patience, His unwillingness to break a bruised reed, His having gone to a cross for people who were not asking Him to, is available and specific and it is the actual content of what that man needed.

You are not the one who has to supply the verdict, and that leaves both your hands free for the thing you can actually give. Nothing written anywhere made an honest minister empty handed at a graveside, and the Spirit hands a man the character of God to speak when he has no finding to report.

Next time, and there will be a next time, say the first thing more briefly and the second thing for two minutes.

Three seconds is not a failure

Here is the last part, and it is for you rather than for him.

Those three seconds have been filed as a professional failure. They were not. A man who answers that question instantly is a man who has an answer ready, and a ready answer to that question is always either a lie or a formula.

The pause was integrity showing up as silence. That is worth more than the smooth sentence you wish you had produced.

You did not fail him. Nothing written anywhere requires a minister to have the information that God reserved, and the Spirit was in that three seconds with you rather than watching from the cars.

And ring the son. Not to correct the record, and not with a better line prepared. Say that you have been thinking about his question, and then tell him about the character of God for two minutes, and let him do what he does with it. A week is not too late. A year would not be too late. Nothing written anywhere puts an expiry on a kindness, and the Spirit is not embarrassed by a man who comes back to a conversation late.